Monday, April 30, 2007

Ana Aguila on Fanon and Life on Mars


E725 graduate student Ana Aguila sent in a blog entry on a cd about a month ago and i have just gotten around to posting it; here it is with my apologies:

Hello, professor. With the readings of Fanon dealing with racism and Martinican’s desire to be white, I came across this clip from a British drama called Life on Mars. It’s a crime series set in the 1970s with an honest cop from the future (that is 2007). This season the show’s been dealing a lot with race themes. The writers mix 70s and 2000s’ ideologies to get controversial stories. The cop from 2007 is always shown as the voice of reason: the good guy that sees everyone as a human and not as a color. The enclosed clip is about a hate crime. It shows the good cop arresting a skinhead after terrorizing a Pakistani neighborhood in Manchester, England. I liked the fact that the writers of the show are dealing with important themes such as race. The two ideologies from 70s and 2000s are represented as opposites: one filled with racism and the other filled with interracial relationships. The writers are trying to juxtapose the two in order to reflect the current situation with racism. I found the clip surprising and shocking.

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